


wastelands

by isoldewas



Series: like you know him [3]
Category: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (TV)
Genre: F/M, Midge throws a punch, Unreliable Narrator, but Lenny’s into it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:20:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22230088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isoldewas/pseuds/isoldewas
Summary: How fitting for Vegas to make her feel like scorched earth.(s03 AU: Midge isn't doing well on tour. Lenny knows exactly what she's talking about.)
Relationships: Lenny Bruce (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel)/Miriam "Midge" Maisel
Series: like you know him [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1538194
Kudos: 56





	wastelands

**Author's Note:**

> tried midge’s pov. she got depressed.
> 
> [spookyshai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookyshai) read it first, liked it and made it better <3

_"nothing is going on so nothing can stop."_  
1.05 of alias grace

  
She calls Joel so that she won’t call her mother.

His voice alone is enough to anchor her, she just wishes he’d stop talking. His words land with unprecedented cruelty.

_Hey Midge, where you at? No, I know you’re not here, here. No, I didn’t forget. Yes. Of course, Midge, I’m blaming you already. It’s day four and I simply can’t do it alone, uh-huh, come back. Yes, I think I’m very funny, don’t you?_

The whole conversation lasts three minutes, two thirty-five to be precise (Midge checks her watch four times). It sends her on a spiral. That night on stage, where she’d thought she’d go for Jewish mothers, she goes for Jewish in-laws and then back to her husband. 

It makes her skin crawl: she’d been here already. A year ago, she’d said this exact bit. She can see Susie shaking her head, stubbing a cigarette, her gestures a bit more aggressive than usual.

Midge looks around the room. It’s supposed to be getting good. Any second now. Feel the crowd’s heartbeat, find her footing, not screw up the mic work.

  
It’s her first week in Las Vegas and whoever said Vegas was a great place to come to clearly lied. It’s impossibly neon. It’s very distracting. The people, the ads, the noise. And not the New York noise, a familiar lull of cars and insistent shouting. Here, it’s the constant clinking of glasses, conversations during her set, the incessant ringing of slot machines, laughter out of sync with her punchlines. It’s Susie’s “You’re good!” on repeat. It’s Susie hissing “You thrive under pressure” at Midge, both reassuring and not reassuring at all. “I do no such thing!” Midge responds, a shitty, quickly mounted defense. Susie squints at her but doesn’t say anything else.

It used to be true. It used to be in her nature. 

How fitting for Vegas to make her feel like scorched earth.

  
Her first set was a disaster. And yet.

Even as Midge complained to Susie in hushed tones, trying to keep it from Angie, even as she grabbed Susie’s hand under the table— there was an understanding there: they both knew it was temporary. Everything was going to sort itself out. This wasn’t Midge. _It’s a rough patch. It’ll pass._

Her second set was a bit smoother. Midge could anticipate the disappointment so she knew how to navigate around it without crashing.

The third night in Vegas had her on her toes, excited. She fully expected to come up on stage and _know._ What to say, exactly how to. The ins and outs of it have long since become familiar. She is okay, she’s good, tits up. Why are her hands sweaty—

That doesn’t happen.

She’s chasing the crowd, the tension, the parts that used to always be there for her to grab. Midge reaches for it and finds nothing. She takes a step to her right, away from the harsh light blinding her. Maybe it’s good though: if she can’t see the people having dinner in front of her, she won’t be as thrown off. If there’s no way to check in, and nothing to measure herself against, she’ll have to be her own barometer. 

Only that’s not working either. 

  
Reggie’s glaring at her, uneasy, from the corner. His hands crossed over his chest, his eyes on her, her cheeks flush and she starts talking faster. The food, the curtains, her unmarried life. One dirty joke and Midge shoots Reggie a look: he’s not exactly pleased with her, is he? Maybe if she keeps talking at this pace _(“The buffet here is pretty good. But don’t touch the lasagna!”),_ she’ll stumble towards the natural end of the set before Reggie has the time to run backstage.

She tries to access the bubbling energy inside of her. It’s angry and frustrating, but at least it’s there. It’s very much her, this new version of her that’s begun to sink into everything. She attacks the man at the far left table, _you, yes, you, obviously your daddy’s son, look at his watch!_ He keeps turning around with his cigarette in search of a lighter. “I’ll light it for you,” Midge says and walks off the stage, patting her seamless dress for a pocket. Reaches into the front of her dress as if she’s going to fish it out of there. 

Reggie and Susie corner her afterward in a desperate attempt at collaboration. Midge turns, a full one-eighty, a big bright smile plastered on. She knows how to do that at least. A second skin is hard to shed. “Don’t insult the audience,” they say to her. “Behave,” is the gist. _Fuck the audience,_ Midge thinks but can’t say.

  
So she reins it in. Reggie’s eyes follow her around so she keeps it cool, keeps it civil. She slips up once, a crude comment on the state of her sex life and stops herself, turns it around at full speed so, of course, it doesn’t land well. She can hear a fork scratching on a plate. Shy will fucking fire her. 

When Reggie’s not in the crowd he’s backstage. Midge isn’t exactly thrilled at the idea of having to explain herself. So she’s tame. Docile. She channels it into the impression of herself from two years ago: _Yes, Joel. No, Ethan! Of course Papa!_ Inside her everything twists at the words. _I am not that, I am not that. Someone tell me am not that._

She catches Susie after. Good, fair, honest Susie who tells her that _no, the fuck, you are not that, you are good. Good_ strikes Midge as a bit of an overstatement for the mess she’s just delivered but she’ll take it. She’s been gathering compliments from all around. A nice shiny stack of things she could turn to when she feels herself unravel.

She tries to play with it next time. Midge brings it up on stage: “I see you can’t understand what I’m doing here either,” and ends up worse. There’s a woman in the first row, violet dress and smirking, that doesn’t clap once. Digging around her discomfort is like poking at an open wound. Midge lets it be and it swallows her whole. No breakthrough. Just more of the same. For five more months.

She’s all alone with it. She’s empty.

She’s really fucking glad to get out of Las Vegas.

  
In comparison, Miami is unnervingly calm.

While Susie’s getting the keys, Midge looks around with no idea where to start. She’s abandoned the idea of getting it right one of these days. She doesn’t expect a change of hotel to bring up anything in her. Because that’s all there is now: the hotel. The sets. Susie. A set, a joke, a couple laughs. Susie and drinks. Sleep, another set, bumping into Shy, all pleasantries and gossip that never touch on his apparent disappointment. Susie waiting for her with a martini, “I’m going to kiss you,” Susie, helping her navigate the crowd to not bump into Reggie. Another set, Susie with another drink, a set, Susie. Stale food, the same dress every damn night, a drink, a second, a fourth. Susie, Susie, Susie, Susie. And yellow teddy bears everywhere.

The days are never-ending. Nights are worse. She tosses in her bed, trying and failing to avoid eye contact with the teddy bears. She checks her watch. She has no idea what to do with herself. Miami’s kind of empty.

Even if she learns the layout of the streets, it won’t matter. They are leaving in a few days, it won’t help. It’ll be this from now on, streets with no names, a reality sized down to the hotel, stretching itself to an occasional swimming pool. Apart from the prebought postcards to Imogene and the kids, she has no desire to engage with the kaleidoscope of the tour’s attractions. 

Calling Joel isn’t an option, he’ll just put Ethan on. Not that Joel would even know what to do with her like this. You try telling him you think you’re actually good but it’s terrible. He’ll just, again, put Ethan on. This time a clear condemnation of her life choices. Screw that.

She feels very— disconnected from everyone. Ethan and Esther. Papa. Real people, she knows that much, but abstract entities. Maybe she’s starting to forget. How New York felt in her skin, the hot stale air, the subway. Sputtering words at her butcher, the whole of the Gaslight, bumping into Lenny, trying to find where to sit down in Susie’s apartment, anything. She misses her mother. Midge lies there, a knot in her throat, wondering at how much of her life is no longer hers. She turns on her side, grabs the teddy bear nearest to her and throws it across the room.

Miami’s empty but not like her. It's giving her space she doesn’t know what to do with.

  
So maybe she wishes him into existence. What does she know.

  
For most of the show, her eyes are set heavy on a blurry shape in the far corner. Midge gets to her punchlines, one by one, gets a laugh. Gets a few, actually. She wants desperately to finish up, bow, _not forget to introduce the band_ and go check.

He waves at her from the far corner of the room and she knows.

Sure, it’s been a while but that’s him, alright. That’s Lenny. She’s not going to play at ignorance: she recognizes the cut of his suit, the way he lights his cigarette. She can’t really mistake him for anyone else. And why would she: she doesn’t really think of him unless he’s there. She brings her set to a halt in unnerving silence. The crowd cheers for Shy while Midge is making her way through the room. Up close the people are just as noisy, blurry, terrible, whereas Lenny’s easy to concentrate on. His face shifts even as she looks at him.

“You were—” he starts as she approaches, a series of quick nods, eyebrows raised, arms crossed, one hand coming up to his mouth. She knows the look. She doesn’t need it. Her hands clutch at her dress.

He was supposed to have known not to say anything about her performance. She raises her hands in a mockery of defense before he starts with the words he doesn’t mean. She wants to get out of there. Midge picks her way through the crowd, toward the exit. Lenny follows her without question.

The air outside burns her lungs. She breathes in deeply: if she catches the flu she won’t have to go on stage tomorrow. Her hands curl into fists. “I want to punch someone.” The words are out before she knows she’s speaking. Figures she’d— 

“Go on,” Lenny says to her left. He’s looking down, stubbing his cigarette with his foot. “Punch me.” 

A loud bubbling _yes_ overflows her body. She wants to get violent, wants to grab at something solid with her two hands, she wants to scale it back. Nothing to be alarmed about, just an exaggeration gone rogue, move along. Midge keeps staring at him. He looks very solid, very present.

She feels empty. And she feels full with it, the absence seeping out. Lenny stares up at her, smirking. Like he knows what’s eating away at her. 

Midge looks around and then she looks at them from the outside in. As if it’s a week later and she’s doing a bit and telling the crowd: “I mean, I didn’t know what to do! He obviously didn’t know what to do! The man just asked me to punch him, for fuck’s sake.” 

Lenny’s waiting. He’s serious. And here she thought him incapable of giving comfort.

He’s still looking at her. _“How much clearer could he be?!”_

She thinks, for one delirious moment, it makes sense. She thinks, even if it doesn’t. It makes for a funny story and she has turned into someone who’ll use whatever’s in front of her. (Two weeks later, she’ll think there was nothing behind his words. That was all her.)

Midge punches him in the arm. She goes through the motions, her knuckles grazing his jacket with no real force to it. With an exaggerated _ouch_ he stares at her. 

“Can I, uhm—” She didn’t expect it to have an impact. _Again._ She’s barely scratched the surface of her violence. _Can I do that again?_

He nods.

Her hand meets with his jaw and the pain on impact is nothing like pain. It’s sharp and the only thing not out of focus is where she wants to hit him next. His stomach, his forearms, his hip, and maybe then he’ll grab her and stop her and she’ll have an excuse to thrash against him and fall apart at the seams. Maybe, for once, he’ll put her together.

“Wanna do this again tomorrow?” he asks. His jaw looks just fine. 

  
So the next day he meets her after another mediocre set. 

“Do you need to get changed?”

“Uh?” She looks down at herself, checks how uncomfortable her heels are and the state of her dress. She needs to get out of here before she punches someone else. And it’s a good dress. 

“No, no, I’m good.” The words slide off her tongue, easy and comfortable, an echo of what Susie keeps telling her. He’s smiling.

  
The fact that he has now seen two of her awkward performances fills her with dread. Whereas he’s about to deliver a great one, she’s sure. It’s a nice enough club and she’s got a nice enough table. She’s fine. Lenny walks out on stage to the applause.

Maybe he didn’t mean to drag her out here. Tonight is more of take two anyway. 

He looks very different from how he did yesterday. The light around him, the allure and fame make it into a kind of glow, almost a halo. Maybe that’s what happens on stage, the audience permitting. Maybe even now, were she to get up there, she’d look like that. Whole and unnerving. Perfect.

Lenny fidgets and keeps talking, a smile, a pause. He looks like he might have everything together. A suit, a salary. A crowd, their laughter, right on cue. He makes it look easy. It’s just that— Midge knows better. To him, right now, it’s not. Nothing strikes her as inevitably funny. His bits are clever but she can’t unsee what’s beneath. His suit is freshly pressed and all she can think is, someone told him to. This is actually terrifying. She watches him in a haze of slack stupefaction. That’s not Lenny.

His crowd bursts into applause and he does this thing with hands, a _please hold your applause_ but also a _yes, yes, I know._ It’s endearing. It’s something Lenny does often, she notices, a gesture meant to placate and control. His movements are swift and well-rehearsed like he’s using his own uncertainty, like he knows it plays well with the crowd. It’s a kind of calculated honesty that reads as almost manipulative. 

She doesn't even know if she believes it. Maybe it’s all her. Maybe that’s what she needs him to be tonight. Calculated and cold and entirely aware. Solid and untouchable, so that if Midge slips up and gets cruel he won’t mind.

Around her everyone claps their hands and throws their heads back. Midge wants desperately to be one of them. She wants to be the woman in the gorgeous violet dress sipping on her second Martini, holding hands with her husband. Who might or might not be Joel, literally, Midge isn’t sure whether Joel got the annulment. He promised he’d call today. Maybe he did. She didn’t hang around to find out, did she?

Nothing about Joel seems easy right now. She wants to leave.

She’s getting used to it but the thing sits in her, uncomfortable and foreign. She breathes in and out. This state she’s in. It won’t stop bothering her, it throws her off at every— Laughter erupts around her and she’s actually caught that last bit. “Now, if you ask me, that’s just downright boring.” Sure, it’s a joke, it’s got twists and turns like any other. It’s also true. That someone wrote that, that he thinks that. That he can’t think in a different pattern, can’t reach some other conclusion. That he’s not panicking. It’s worse. A kind of slow panic you get used to. She’s so goddamn terrified it’d feel that way for her too. She wants to run away from it, to scrub it off her skin with the best soap Macy’s has to offer, to shed this particular shade of desperate and get back to herself at long last. The longer she sits there wailing in it, the closer she is to— him, to that person up on stage she can hardly recognize, to—

There’s nothing left of him, she thinks as she stands up.

  
She asks for a cigarette off a passing lady. 

It’s getting colder. Midge leans back against the brick wall and takes a drag. Miami is not her kind of city.

The street’s empty until people start to leave. Lenny’s set must be over. They stay in groups, they wander off the street and Midge finds herself alone again. The cool air is soft on her skin, the lights unfocused and warm. It’s very peaceful. She doesn’t belong here.

She stubs out her cigarette against the wall and takes a deep breath before going back in.

Lenny’s sitting at the bar. There’s a familiar unease to him. When she hops on the chair beside him he turns his head and arches an eyebrow. One on one, he’s easier to look at.

“And here I thought you left,” Lenny says it in a very matter-of-fact manner although she sees the tension ease off his posture. She puts her bag on the bar counter, gestures to a barman to get a drink. To her left, Lenny echoes her movements, raising his glass. 

There’s something she needs to say to him.

The man brings over the drinks. Lenny doesn’t wait for her, he doesn’t even wait to finish off his first one. Midge takes a sip of her martini, extra dry, wondering how the hell she’s going to bring it up. She gives him a once over, a strange, undefined one. She’s not sure what she’s searching for. She can’t just throw the questions at him as they are: unformed, messy and desperate. What do you do with the state of prolonged panic? How do you— Do you wait it out?

Lenny keeps shifting in his chair. She wonders whether there’s a bruise on his arm from where she’d hit him yesterday. She doesn’t think so. She maybe wants to check. Midge sets down her drink in one sharp motion.

Again, she wants to scale it back to where they were before. To the pull and pull and pull and push they always had, to the witty conversation she single-handedly provided, to the words he’d throw her way, completely unrelated to her busy existence. They’d get stuck in her mind. They’d be made true in no time at all.

Honestly, Midge’d settle for more of the same. Ever since Joel’s departure, anything stable has been inaccessible: she scarcely remembers what the word even stood for. It occurs to her that the tour might be the closest thing to a routine she’s had in a year. She’s failing miserably, isn’t she? What if she isn’t made for something durable anymore, what is she needs to be kept on her toes, a hungry artist— Maybe Susie should keep her away from the little sandwiches they serve at the bar!

Midge chuckles at that, wants to bring it up immediately. If she leads into it with a laugh, just like Lenny does in his sets, maybe her pain won’t register as pain. She bites down on the words. Jokes are spikes, already they feel uncomfortable in her mouth. There’s nowhere for this to go, she’s got nothing to say. Lenny’s been silent for a while. He too is giving her space she has no idea what to do with.

“I don’t know how to—” as her voice breaks, she stops herself, again. _Because it’s not me and it’s supposed to be me and I can’t do it and I can do anything, I should be excited and I’m just not. Say it, say it, say it,_ she pleads with herself.

She has words. And so many ways to begin, thousands, really. A part of her is willing to give it a try: whatever comes out could be dealt with. Lenny’d be okay with it, too. He’d sit there with his cigarette, his eyes darting to hers just before she touches on something terribly important.

Last summer he’d asked her whether Benjamin knew. That she’s been corrupted. Midge wonders whether she knew. Exactly how much. Maybe then she could show him the extent of it. Like a searing would in her side, she’d pick up her skirts and drag them up till it was out in the open: the wound, the damage, the reason for it. How little she cares about her bare legs. How far she is from everything her mother wanted her to be. How sad it really is, that she belongs to nothing now.

She glances up at Lenny. _Look at him._ All the place allowed for sorrow is already taken up. Midge hates that about him, hates it because now, she has her own.

She studies the stitching of his suit over the hunched shoulders. The black cloth of his jacket that’s a couple years old. The sharp lines of his profile draped in shadows. They aren’t set but in perpetual motion as if no part of him can keep still. _It’s unbearable,_ she thinks. This weight in her is new and ancient. She broke off her engagement. She’d left the kids with Joel. Yet here it is again: the familiar pressure to be something you weren’t made for. She wants for everything to unravel, to click and settle into its own. And she wants nothing to do with it.

“Yeah,” Lenny scoffs and shakes his head, fumbles for a pack of cigarettes in his pocket. She can’t tear her eyes from his fingers. “I don’t know how to either,” he says, the light and his hands too close to his mouth for it to be clear. She thinks that’s what he’s saying. She really wants him to have said that.

He glances at her and Midge feels her mouth set into a thin line. She just doesn't know how to do that with, _to,_ him. He looks thinner than before.

"You could lie too, you know." Midge can’t tear her eyes from him. "Hide it better." 

Lenny shoots her a look. She holds it, unflinching.

He’s the one to look away. Suddenly, he’s running his mouth. He provides her with a detailed account of his latest car ride to Miami Springs or something. He keeps adding up more details on top of his story, keeps messing up the location, “So we get out at Kendale Lakes and—”

It’s awfully nice of him to play at her while she’s playing at him.

It’s just that, if she opens her mouth, if he starts to understand— it could be used against her. And it’s not even him she’s worried about. Like anything else in her life, she’ll take this pained confession and twist it into a usable punchline. She’d anything for a good set right now. She just can’t do that to herself. 

“And he’d juggle and—” Her eyes flick to his neck and then to her empty glass. One hell of a martini, honestly. She feels her every limb grow warm. Despite herself, the corner of her mouth rises, and it’s a full-blown grin before she can stop herself. She doesn’t want to, anyway. She’d like to see how far she’ll go.

“You know, I—” he cuts himself off when meeting her eyes. She has no idea what’s across her face. She’s lazy around him. He laughs, and just like that, she’s laughing too. It’s a very good drink.

  
They’ve been here for at least an hour.

She talks, unchecked. Midge might not have anything to add on Kendale Lakes but she has plenty on other bodies of water the Weissmans have been around for generations. She never starts with the thing she came to talk about. Lenny’s leaning back in his chair while Midge props herself against the bar, closer to her second glass. Midge watches him swallow the last of his drink, shift in his suit like it’s pressing down on him, crack a smile at her rant. The place around them is coming into focus too, the brick walls, the black and white sketches of the city wherever she looks.

Lenny’s hand comes up to his mouth. It covers his smile too and without it, he looks like he’s studying her, trying to make sense of her unease. As if it were a monolith. As if it grew and fed from just one place: kill that and you’re golden. He should know better. She can’t breathe. Her ribs hurt from laughing, her throat is dry and she can’t fucking breathe.

She hates that he’s here and looks exactly like the solution to all her problems. When she saw him last, he was the one comparing himself to Sisyphus. There’s nothing pleasant about the shift. Beneath the easy banter, she finds an old ache of something tearing apart from her. Esther. Her mother. Joel.

Compared to all that, Lenny’s easy to look at. The grin, the hungry eyes, the way he can’t seem to tear his eyes off her— she’s convinced he hasn’t noticed the black and white sketches, for one. She blinks at him, trying to reassess. How he looks. How he talks. How he looks at her. _Oh God._ She’s found easy.

She does it on purpose then, blabbering till it’s visible, till it’s not subtle. Lenny laughs, trying very hard not to spit out his drink. It tugs at her insides, that warm feeling she doesn’t want to touch on. It’s there nonetheless. It’s flattering. And it’s too warm to be that.

Midge has been here already: Jo— Huh. No. She’d thought about this, this exact thing. She’d been guessing at how his eyes look when he’s uncomfortable. She must have thought and tossed it aside: unusable, messy, _would you look at him._ She’s looking. All she has right now are the things that are messy and unusable. She’s acquired a taste. 

She keeps smiling at him. He has to notice at some point. In a very detached and tipsy way, she lets the corner of her mouth go slack.

He glances at her and stops mid-sentence. It strikes her that he’s half in love with her and she’s only now noticing. Lenny leans back, unflinching. This changes nothing.

  
Getting Lenny out of the bar is simple. She points to one of the sketches. He squints his eyes, clearly noticing the decor for the first time when Midge asks him about a rendering of a bridge. 

She keeps on asking as they walk out, can’t allow herself to stop the interrogation and consider what’s driving it. He doesn’t look like he wants to consider either. He keeps half a step behind her as they turn the corner. The wind on this side of the building is rising up and Midge shivers. Lenny stills for half a moment, considering giving her his jacket and deciding against it. They turn the corner again and the wind’s not too bad. She’s glad she doesn’t have to ask.

Turns out, he can talk architecture. Turns out, she can too. It keeps them busy until Lenny gestures to a passage, “This way,” and they end up outside of a hotel he clearly knows his way around.

Lenny fumbles for a key in his pocket. He closes the door behind them. Midge’s not three steps in yet she’s standing right in the middle of it. Too close to the bed for there to be anything subtle about it.

“So?” It’s embarrassing how her voice breaks on one syllable. How she’s not breathing at all. How she knows that his fingers are long and pale and she wants him to be right in the middle of the room too. Lenny looks— unconcerned. On edge but suddenly very still. It throws her off. Someone should really fill up the empty space with chatter. Her ankles hurt from the heels. 

She makes a step, places her hands on the lapels of his jacket. Slowly, Midge pulls the jacket off down his arms without meeting his eyes. She doesn’t want to know where he’s at. His body’s slightly bent, like he’d settle for taking up less space. Funny how she has always wanted to take up more than she’s been given.

Lenny watches her, very careful, as if she were in a state. Well, she is. He looks like he knows what she couldn’t say.

Midge leans in with her upper body, makes a step forward. Her hands feel warm and tingly. She hooks a finger in his belt loop. It seems like the safest part of him. No clothes involved, no skin, no eye contact. Just an inconspicuous accessory that means nothing when she tethers her finger to it. Her finger curls around his belt and she looks up. Lenny’s blushing, his arms rigid at his sides.

It’s a new and unfamiliar place. She wants to punch him. Midge grabs at his shirt and puts her mouth on his neck, whatever. She’s an object in motion, she doesn’t stop. He doesn’t stop her.

So what if she doesn’t come off as gentle. There’s nothing gentle about her, there’s nothing left. The best of her is gone. She can twist her words into any cruelty, she should pioneer another type of comedy: an insulting, deranged kind. The mad divorcee of the Upper West Side has a very nice ring to it.

Lenny brings his hands to her shoulders and retreats.

Midge can feel the blush spreading to her neck, her erratic breathing, weak knees, the whole ordeal. The symptoms— huh, like it’s a disease, like it’s corrupting her— are the same as they always were, yet something about this feels unhinged. 

“You’re being—” He draws in a breath. 

Her mind’s racing. _Impossible. Rude. Naive._ She feels she’s broken something. 

“Kind,” and the look on him is unbearable. It strikes her: he brought her here.

He's using her too.

She wants to scream. To hit him harder than he can hit her. She wants things to be ruined because she was there to ruin them.

Lenny kisses her. He asks “Can I do that again?”

She reaches for the belt buckle. There’s not much space between them, he’s still kissing her when she gets his fly down. When Midge wraps a hand around him, he closes his eyes, all of it predictable. And then he says _Midge._ He can’t seem to stop, a record skipping over the rest of the sentence. All she wants is to know what he’s not saying, wants to see behind the words, but it’s a perfect loop, _MidgeMidgeMid—_ until he breathes out on a chuckle. He laughs around her name and she twists her hand. He doesn't laugh at that. 

“Midge, you have to know,” he starts.

She shakes her head. No. She doesn’t have to do anything. Nothing except get up on that stage every time and _not forget to introduce the band._ He should really shut up.

“Midge,” he says instead. “You are so irritatingly good.” 

It’s like the words are dragged from him against his will, said without his explicit permission, in direct contrast to his body. They settle heavy in her gut. 

She wants to pull at the threads, at the very visible, not subtle wires coming out of him. To take all that sadness, to shake it up with her own, to make something of it. She knows she could. She could really do that. She’s got time. She’s got the space in her life. Midge looks around the quasi empty room. He’s got space too.

There’s something scary to the pair of them. How much of him she recognizes immediately. How easy it is for him to read across her face. How she could twist her hand right now and he’d fall apart.

Lenny pushes her closer to the bed, her calves bumping up against the mattress, his thigh between her legs. His palms feel heavy on her ribs like he would like to crush her.

She doesn’t think it’s him she’s sparing here. It’s not up to her to fix him, she doesn’t think. And if they go on like this, she’d want to. She might really want to. 

His hands cling to her. She throws her head back: she doesn’t need to know what’s so openly on his face. After all it took to get here, she just doesn’t want do end up— “Midge, you’re—" Unhappy.

Her eyes feel very warm all of a sudden. She doesn’t dare blink. She keeps staring right into the ceiling until the tears dry up in her eyes.

His body pressed to hers, she finds herself very alone. She wants to say something, strings of words are forming at the back of her throat— Lenny brings his hand between her legs, and that’s where she wants to shut up.

  
Her back on the bed, black dress hiked up to her waist, his hands land on her thighs, sending shivers up and down and everywhere. Lenny puts his mouth against her and she wants to scream again, to tell him how she doesn’t do this, how she’s just irretrievably sad all the time. How she’s been cold and slow and unnerving to herself yet now she can’t seem to find any trace of that. Under his hands she’s on fucking fire, brilliant and blinding. She closes her eyes and it’s worse. She can’t concentrate on anything but his mouth, the hard press of his fingers, the sharp line of his shoulders digging in under her bent knee. She wants him to look at her and can’t bring herself to say anything. Like it’s all locked in, burnt on the inside of her skin, set into her bones.

He’s— good at this too. 

Midge props herself up on her elbows like her arms aren’t weak. She needs to tell him something now, and she has nothing. She has too much.

She grips his scalp in her hand and tugs till he winces. Lenny looks up at her, pulls away. “What?” His voice is hoarse. Like he’s forgotten how to talk, like his mind’s blank, like she’d finally made the harrowing voice in his head shut up.

His fingers are working at her, in her, as he angles her body, as Midge pushes herself up and into his lap, as they sit on the edge of the bed, almost completely clothed. Who’s got time for that nonsense.

She curls her fingers on his hips, digs in. In the bloodthirsty spirit of last evening, she wants to draw blood. 

He pushes into her and she doesn’t feel empty then. 

The strands of her hair fall into her eyes and Midge can’t look at him, can’t see him, can’t move— She bites down on his shoulder to stop herself from saying, incomplete, unscripted things that’ll ruin whatever semblance of comfort is happening right now. She comes not looking at him, completely unaware that she is all he can look at. That this here is the whole of the highlight reel and that it’s because she’s shut her eyes that he lets himself whisper “Midge” into her hair. It doesn’t register with her, she doesn’t know who Midge is. The name belongs to a creature of bliss and competence. Right now, she’s a wreckage being pulled together by a natural disaster.

He comes soon after that.

  
They lie on the bed for a while. As an afterthought, Midge pulls at the side of her dress. Lenny starts unbuttoning his shirt. No one says a word.

He helps her with the zipper when it gets stuck. It’s awkward, his fingers sloppy and his face dumbstruck. Midge catches his eye and they giggle. Everything in her feels like it’s slowing down. That ugly thing in her starts to unravel.

She gets up to turn off the lights. She has words. 

They rush out of her, strings of fully formed ideas. _She’s terrible and it’s every night. It’s this job. It’s not easy. It’s never easy. It’s a shitty terrible thing to be good at this._

“What are you talking about,” Lenny interrupts, his eyes unfocused. He has completely missed the point— “You were great.”

She blinks at him. He’s not lying. 

She really was good. Today and yesterday. And all the days before that. Something inside her explodes. 

She feels new with it all, she can reach anything. Midge reaches for him, across the bed. He lies there, the covers around his legs. In the neon glow from the signs outside, he’s green around the edges. 

His face is empty. When he looks at her there’s nothing real behind the eyes.

Midge digs her nails into his arm. _How dare you._


End file.
